I don't necessarily agree with this, but do believe it is an interesting point of view. Writing in Wired Magazine's web site, Robert McMillan writes from the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco this week. Several of the leading security experts at the conference made surprising statements: they don't use anti-virus software in their own computers.
Jeremiah Grossman, Chief Technology Officer at security consultancy White Hat Security, points out that all the anti-virus programs protect you against past problems. However, most viruses that propagate through the Internet are new and are not detected by existing anti-virus software.
The pros are generally smart enough to avoid the things that will get them hacked — visiting malicious websites or opening documents from untrusted sources. But even if they get fooled, the odds are their antivirus software catching it are pretty low. But many of these pros also believe that antivirus isn’t always that useful to the average business either. “If you asked the average security expert whether they use antivirus or not,” Grossman says “a significant proportion of them do not.”
You can read the entire article at http://goo.gl/zw5nA.
While this is an interesting story, I wouldn't recommend you immediately uninstall your present anti-virus software. After all, it does provide protection against older problems that do still exist. You also should make sure that software is updated daily. However, I would suggest you also read the section in the article about AVOIDING problems: don't visit malicious websites or open documents from untrusted sources.
I suspect that most viruses, trojans, and other malware can be avoided simply by being cautious.
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